NeilA wrote: ↑Tue May 07, 2024 8:20 am
Trev wrote: ↑Tue May 07, 2024 8:15 am
Buster121 wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2024 10:13 pm
Of course I'm not I was saying not all go to bop, I have lost birds myself and had them come back ripped open, but you cannot blame bop for every loss
I quite agree Buster
There is no doubting the fact that the Bop issue has got so much worse and it's now Goshawks as well as Peregrines, back in the war years peregrine's were controlled to protect the messenger pigeons, but since then the numbers have continued to grow, some of this naturally and some with the aid of human intervention. I agree that the human intervention needs to stop and just let nature take care of it, but of course part of the original idea behind the introduction of artificial nesting sites was to try and control the growth of the feral pigeons in towns, cities and on listed buildings such as Cathedrals etc !!
However it is too easy to blame every loss we suffer on Hawks, but there are so many other factors to take into consideration that unless we track every single pigeon we will never really know where all our missing birds end up !! There is certainly no point blaming the RPRA as there is very little they can do, if the big money game shoots can't do anything then the RPRA don't stand much chance, and if they moved every liberation site away from hawks then we'd have nowhere left to go !!
I have a massive issue with the Sparrow hawks here during the closed season but do seem to get lucky when it comes to hits from races, but maybe my birds are only the wily Homer's lol
We do of course have club and Federation members who have lost good birds including Federation winners, and a couple of years ago I did have a ring of one of my birds found in the Peregrine's nest on Salisbury cathedral !!
8 different peregrines listed by birders at one church over 2 months in Grantham where we race from but you could be right maybe I need to get some homers and be happy to look at them all winter
We have a couple of old boys in the club always behind but never seem to lose any racing so there could be something in it if there not in a pack racing hard maybe
I'm not a hawk specialist but and certainly wouldn't want to call whoever came up with this information a liar, but I do find that kind of information a bit difficult to swallow as birds of prey, particularly Peregrine's, are very territorial, especially at this time of year, so to have 8 in the same location is very unlikely !!!
I am obviously one of those "old boys" mate
but I enjoy what I do. I do stick by what I said though, that there are many other factors to take into consideration. The birds might have hit something, made a mistake and got dragged of line or simply for some unknown or unseen reason just weren't right on that day !! One of our top fliers lost a multiple fed winner from our first race this year, but he admitted himself that that bird, although he stil flew around home and felt right, just hadn't been itself over the winter !! A lot of our losses are simply down to our errors, in my experience, and I don't profess by any stretch of the imagination, to be a top flier, but its easy to turn miss tiny signs that tell us when our best pigeons aren't quite on it, purely because they are top quality birds and have done it all before, we think that quality will over come everything else, even the top athletes have bad days !!!
We do of course have club and Federation members who have lost good birds including Federation winners, and a couple of years ago I did have a ring of one of my birds found in the Peregrine's nest on Salisbury cathedral !!
but I enjoy what I do. I do stick by what I said though, that there are many other factors to take into consideration. The birds might have hit something, made a mistake and got dragged of line or simply for some unknown or unseen reason just weren't right on that day !! One of our top fliers lost a multiple fed winner from our first race this year, but he admitted himself that that bird, although he stil flew around home and felt right, just hadn't been itself over the winter !! A lot of our losses are simply down to our errors, in my experience, and I don't profess by any stretch of the imagination, to be a top flier, but its easy to turn miss tiny signs that tell us when our best pigeons aren't quite on it, purely because they are top quality birds and have done it all before, we think that quality will over come everything else, even the top athletes have bad days !!!